Tottenham Hotspur lived up to their reputation for transfer deadline day drama when they emerged in the final hours to beat Liverpool to the £6m purchase of Clint Dempsey, signed the Lyon goalkeeper Hugo Lloris for a fee that could rise to £13m but failed in their pursuit of the priority target, Porto's João Moutinho.

Dempsey's arrival represented the final act of a summer-long saga, that had seen the American forward agitate for a move, miss matches for Fulham and draw the interest of a clutch of rival clubs.

Fulham reported Liverpool to the Premier League last week, claiming that they had tapped him up while Aston Villa had a £7m offer for the 29-year-old accepted on Friday morning.

With Liverpool, though, unable to come up with a competitive figure, Tottenham swept in to finalise the deal at a slightly lower price that Villa's. Sunderland had also shown an interest in Dempsey, who had less than 12 months to run on his Fulham contract, but he preferred to stay in London and sign for Tottenham, with whom he undertook a medical an hour before the 11pm cut-off.

Earlier in the summer, Tottenham had pipped Liverpool to the £8m signing of the midfielder Gylfi Sigurdsson.

The Tottenham manager André Villas-Boas will never forget his first transfer window at the club, which has taken in Luka Modric's protracted £30m sale to Real Madrid, the £10m departure of Rafael Van Der Vaart to Hamburg, which was completed on Friday, and the acquisition of almost £60m-worth of talent. But he was left to feel irked at the one that got away. Villas-Boas had identified Moutinho as the player that he most wanted from the moment that he succeeded Harry Redknapp at Tottenham in July.

He had worked with Moutinho when he was the Porto manager and he was on record describing him as "world-class", a player that could make a "direct impact."

Villas-Boas had been pessimistic about the chances of the deal being finalised, largely because he knows that the Porto president Pinto da Costa, under whom he worked, always sells players at very high prices and, perhaps, because he could not see Daniel Levy, the Tottenham chairman, stretching himself to the required level. Moutinho has a €40m release clause in his contract, although that does not mean he cannot be sold for less and on Thursday, Villas-Boas said that the move was "an impossible deal for the club."

Yet Levy submitted a 25m euro offer on Friday which, if accepted, would have outstripped Tottenham's previous largest outlay on the market — the £16.6m that they paid to Dynamo Zagreb for Modric in 2008.

The negotiations were complicated by Sporting Lisbon, the club that sold Moutinho to Porto for €10m in 2010, being owed 25 per cent of any future sale profits and a third-party investor owning 15 per cent of the player's economic rights. The deal went to the very last moment, with Tottenham hoping top be granted additional time to complete it but, having felt close on Friday morning, they could not reach agreement with Porto.

Tottenham sources close to the deal were frustrated at what they saw as Porto changing the parameters as the day wore on, which was somewhat ironic given the back-story to the Lloris transfer.

Lyon had accepted Tottenham's bid for the France No1 last Sunday, with the down payment on the fee being £9.5m but, on Thursday night, the French club accused Levy of lowering his offer by £2m. It prompted the Lyon president Jean-Michel Aulas into a furious tirade, although the deal was revived and concluded.

"The negotiation with the Tottenham directors has been the hardest I have ever had to undergo in 25 years," Aulas said. "Daniel Levy talks a lot and goes back on what we've agreed in writing. Agreements have not at all been respected."

Van Der Vaart did not figure in Villas-Boas' plans and he completed what was an emotional return to Hamburg, where he played for three seasons from 2005. "It feels a bit like coming home," he said. "I'm not Superman, Messi or Ronaldo but I know that I can help the team."